WINNER OF 29 BOOK AWARDS including the Writer’s Digest Grand Prize and the Rubery Book Award Book of the Year.


True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution.

A high position bestowed by China’s empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and ’40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever.

When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home—and that she will never see her father again. She returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family’s past—one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering palaces and underworld crime bosses.


Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss and redemption against an epic backdrop.